A Thousand Glittering Shards
by Hiril Elfwraith
Summary: Tarrant shatters, and only Alice can pick up the pieces. Oneshot. Companion piece to "To Reclaim That Which is Lost"


**A/N: First AiW fic, woot! 8D**

Summary: Tarrant shatters, and only Alice can pick up the pieces. Oneshot.

Tarrant is mad.

This is no surprise—he is the Mad Hatter, after all. But his madness is split, a dangerous duality, the gentle, green-eyed madness that speaks with a soft lisp and the dangerous flame-eyed madness, words choked with Outlandish brogue.

He loses himself during the latter, when his restraint snaps and he burns with anger and hate and that terrible, all-consuming _grief_ that he can never escape. He rages, screams, thrashes and destroys until the darkness drains away and leaves him exhausted and mournful.

He always had a purpose in his rages before, his loathing focused solely on the Bloody Big Head, directing it at her and away from himself. And then she's gone suddenly, taken down by their Champion, by his beautiful, wonderful Alice. But then Alice is gone too, back to her place in Otherland, and he is lost.

The gentle madness sits at the endless tea party and waits, purposeless but believing in her promise. _I'll be back before you know it._ But the dangerous madness bubbles just below the surface and despairs. _No, she's never coming back and there's no hope anymore._ He awakens from these rages with throat raw from his shrieks and he's more grateful than ever for their constant tea party and the soothing, hot liquid—at least, on those days when he can keep it down and when his throat isn't so shredded that he spits back up the tea and clouds his cup with thick blood.

Blood…he bleeds too much now. With no outlet, his malice turns inward. He wakes up with scrapes on his face and arms and body, vibrant orange hair clawed out in tufts. Dangerous. Terrible. He wants to die.

He wakes up one day in Marmoreal, Mally keeping a constant vigil. He realizes that his hat-making tools are nowhere in sight and feels terribly naked without them, and then he sees the stained white bandages on his wrist. Haltingly the dormouse explains that she found him unconscious in a pool of his own blood, a pair of sewing scissors handle-deep in his forearm.

They never leave him on his own after that. Every night the White Queen brings him a potion and makes him drink it, telling him gently that it will keep his sleep dreamless and peaceful. He never protests, because he knows he needs it. She simply smiles and floats out—figuratively, of course, unlike Chessur. The Cat never fails to make Tarrant wish he had something sharp to skin that infuriating creature and make a hat out of him, evaporating skills or no. He doesn't, of course. They never give him anything with more edge than a butter knife.

He understands their reasoning, of course. Although he has no memory of it, he can easily imagine the scene…fingers wrapping around the handle, oh so familiar and slightly worn after years of use, and lifting it high before plunging it down into his flesh with a wordless scream. He can almost see the blood splashing and welling from his wounds, spilling over skin bleached after years of mercury poisoning that would never be fatal (because really, this was _Underland_, after all). Still, he longs for his profession, and he itches to make _something_. By this point, he doesn't even care if he does nothing more than mend tears. But even pins and needles are forbidden ever since that time when he came back to himself just before blacking out and saw her name spelled in vicious scratches on one forearm, punctuated by the tiny silver heads and eyes.

He sobs helplessly into the pillows, gripped in the clutches of another kind of madness, a mournful madness, and he is just as unable to drag himself out of this madness as the burning madness. In these fits he can marshal no will or strength to stem the tears or even want to live anymore, and his eyes drain both green and amber into a watery and sick grey.

He can rarely muster the energy to open his eyes anymore. Alice still isn't there, and he needs her. He needs her desperately. It crushes him, and even his fingernails become weapons. He spends hours sometimes lying under the white sheets where they can't see him, bandages pulled back, scraping bloody grooves into himself. He longs, longs, _longs _for Alice or death, whichever comes first. Right now, the latter seems more likely.

He simply has no hope. He sometimes wonders if she's going to recognize him, too thin and weakened from blood loss, his entire body gone grey in his despair. But that hurts too much, and he curls into himself, pressing on his chest as though that will make the sharp agony inside his soul go away. He begs Mirana sometimes for more of the dreamless sleep potion so he can sleep always, but she refuses gently.

"I'm frightened," he whispers weakly to Mally as she wields a handkerchief over his tearstained face with difficulty, and he wishes vaguely for some pishsalver so that he can accept her comfort more easily. This is followed by a morbid wondering if one would disappear if they drank too much of the stuff, and he gives up on the thought.

The dormouse and sometimes Thackery valiantly attempt to make conversation with him, but he can't seem to. He'll ask them his favorite riddle sometimes, the one without an answer. They guess their best and come to no conclusion, but it doesn't please him like it used to. Instead he simply is reminded of asking Alice the same question, and how she ended up giving up just before she drank the Jabberwocky blood and left him.

"_Why _is _a raven like a writing desk?"_

"_I haven't the slightest idea." _

Then he closes his eyes and whispers "I've been contemplating words that start with _D_…despair…desperation…devastation…_death_…"

Eventually, they give up.

Who knows how long he lay there in the White Queen's castle, crying or screaming or staring listlessly at the ceiling and thinking of Alice or taken by the darkness and trying desperately to end himself. His memory is patchy, but his watchers tell him that he'll spend hours in a trance, whispering Alice's name like a mantra, his voice rising and falling from a barely-breathed murmur to a panicked scream as he thrashes, colorless eyes blank and too wide. His throat bleeds again as his abused vocal cords strain with his shrieks.

Mirana takes one look at him several weeks later, gaunt and dead-eyed and suffering terribly, and gives in. She increases the potency of the sleeping draught and keeps him on it.

Unbeknownst to Tarrant, McTwisp is looking for Alice again, and he isn't the only one—Absolem and even Chessur have taken up the search for their missing Champion. They want Alice back, anyways. Everyone in Underland loves her. The Hatter is just a bit more of incentive to find her quickly, because they can't wait any longer now.

And finally, _finally, _as the Mad Hatter lies dying in a potion-induced coma, the Butterfly and the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat converge on her and wait just long enough for Alice to dash off a quick letter of explanation to her family before whisking her through the Looking Glass and back to Underland, where she truly belongs.

When Alice reaches his bedside, it's nearly too late.

The White Queen drips the antidote to the sleeping potion through his lips.

He opens his eyes when Alice's tears fall on them.

"Are you really here?" he whispers. "Is it…is it really you, Alice?"

"Yes," she whispers back, but he's not quite convinced.

"You're not another…dream?" His battered and mercury-stained hands reach up and touch her face, her hair, and she brushes a too-dim lock of orange hair from his face.

"No," she promises. "I swear that it's really me and I'm really here."

That's all the incentive he needs to pull her into a fierce embrace, sobbing in relief and adoration.

Eventually, after his tears have run out, he presses his face to her pale gold curls and whispers into her ear, "You're terribly late, you know. Naughty."

She just laughs and kisses his forehead, and despite the weakness and the pain he still experiences and will for several weeks, everything is all right again.


End file.
